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Jason Fish, a cultivation manager at Airfield Supplies, irrigates marijuana plants in the mother room on Wednesday, Oct. 13, 2016 in San Jose, Calif. Airfield Supplies is one of San Jose’s 16 legal medical marijuana shops. On Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2016, San Jose’s city council voted to adopt a temporary ban on the sale of recreational marijuana in the city. The temporary ban will include commercial cultivating, processing, manufacturing, distributing, testing and selling of recreational weed. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

Remember that scene in Pulp Fiction when Vince (John Travolta) riffs on the Catch 22 of smoking hash in Amsterdam, explaining to his partner-in-crime Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) that “yeah, it’s legal, but it ain’t a hundred percent legal.”

Well, with California’s Prop. 64 poised to pass on election day, the measure that would legalize recreational marijuana in the state is bound to trigger some serious head-scratching around the Golden State. And magic brownies won’t help the problem.

In one of the more curious twists to the proposition, while Californians would be able legally to possess up to an ounce of marijuana and smoke it the minute they wake up on Nov. 9, they may have to break the law to get their hands on the stuff in the first place. Why? Because it may be as late as 2018 before pot sellers are licensed to sell it under Prop. 64.

To grasp this sticky wicket of a ballot measure, we called on Eugenio Garcia, CEO and co-founder of the Berkeley-based media group Cannabis Now for guidance. Here’s some of that conversation:

So this seems crazy: if Prop. 64 passes, you’ll be able to smoke pot legally, but you won’t be able to purchase it?

Garcia: You see this type of Catch 22 in a lot of the marijuana legislation around the country. In this case, the question is ‘If you can’t legally buy it, how are you supposed to possess it without being forced to do something illegal?’ It’s like the law puts you in a position where you have to obtain it illegally. Then again, assuming you don’t get caught, once you obtain it you’re legally safe.

So we’ll have a law that legalizes doing something but, at least for the next year or so, will also ensure that the process that leads to doing that thing remains illegal.

Garcia: That’s a reflection of the inadequacy and inefficiency of the people who are creating some of these laws. They’re too complicated. If someone does have cannabis, and they get pulled over by the police, they won’t be affected because they won’t be asked ‘Did you obtain this illegally?’ But if the cops sees that same person buying it in an alleyway, then they would be in violation of the law.

So between now and when the sales-licensing system is set up next year, where do I get pot legally?

Garcia: You can’t, unless you have a medical marijuana card.

Note: at this point of the conversation, Prop. 64 is beginning to sound more like an Abbott and Costello routine than it does Pulp Fiction.

Why can’t I go buy it in Oregon, where recreational pot is legal, and bring it back here to California?

Garcia: You’d be in violation of federal law because you’d be crossing state lines with the pot and federal jurisdiction controls the way citizens travel across borders.

So if transporting any Schedule I Controlled Substance, which includes, marijuana, across any state line is a federal felony, what if my buddy has a medical-marijuana card? Can I get the pot from him?

Garcia: He can give it to you legally, but he can’t sell it to you, because he doesn’t have a license to sell medical marijuana.

How about if I grow my own? The new law would allow someone to grow as many as six pot plants at home, right?

Garcia: On Nov. 9 you can start growing six plants, but you would first have to obtain something to grow them from, whether that’s from seeds or from a clone, which is a branch of a marijuana plant. But since you can’t buy seeds or a clone until the law goes into effect in 2017, someone would have to give them to you.

So can a pot farmer, say, give me some seeds to get started?

Garcia: The way the law is written possession and sharing by adults is OK. But you can’t walk into a medical marijuana business and have them give it you, either, because to even step inside a dispensary you need a doctor-prescribed medical marijuana card.

Finally, on top of all these annoying contradictions you have the overarching Catch 22 that while pot may be legal in California if Prop. 64 passes, the feds still consider it illegal, right?

Garcia: Any laws not dictated in the Constitution are referred to the states, so unless you say specifically in the Constitution that you can’t use cannabis then it’s up to states. Unfortunately, cannabis was listed by the FDA as a Schedule I substance and put on the list of dangerous drugs. With Prop. 215, California said that despite what the federal government thinks we disagree. More recently, Congress has said they’ll no longer fund any action by the DEA to impose any sanctions on citizens who are not violating state law.

Patrick May is an award-winning writer for the Bay Area News Group working with the business desk as a general assignment reporter. Over his 34 years in daily newspapers, he has traveled overseas and around the nation, covering wars and natural disasters, writing both breaking news stories and human-interest features. He has won numerous national and regional writing awards during his years as a reporter, 17 of them spent at the Miami Herald. In 1993, Pat shared with his colleagues a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for the Herald staff's coverage of Hurricane Andrew and its aftermath.

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